The 7 elements that impact your email marketing cost

You’re excited to grow an audience and build an online business, but you have a lingering question—how much will email marketing cost?

It depends, but the price you’ll pay to connect with your audience hangs on seven elements, no matter which email marketing platform you choose. This guide reviews what influences email marketing pricing so you can set a budget and choose the right plan for your business.

How to set your email marketing budget

Your email marketing budget depends on seven elements including your email marketing tool, list size, and features. For example, if you’re brand new to email marketing, your email marketing budget can start at $0.

There are free tools that allow creators to gather subscribers and send emails without investing any money. However, as your email list and business grows, your email marketing cost grows from $10-$30 a month up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Our survey of nearly 3,000 creators revealed that 81% of professional creators use an email marketing tool like Kit, for example. That stat makes email marketing tools the most prevalent software that professional creators rely on.

Generally, full-time creators spend more on the tools they use to run their businesses. 28% of full-time creators spend more than $500 a month on tools, and 9% of top earners spend over $5,000. However, for creators as a whole, many spend very little each month—45% of all creators spend under $100 a month on their tech stack.

We don’t know how the average creator divides up that $100 a month, but we can tell you what affects how much you should set aside for your email marketing budget.

#1 – Email marketing software

The email newsletter tool you choose greatly impacts the price of email marketing. You can think of the app as your entrance fee into email marketing—it’s like the cost of entry to an amusement park before you even consider buying themed t-shirts or deep-fried snacks.

The pricing structures you’ll encounter when comparing email marketing tools include:

• Free plan: limited or basic features for new creators
• Paid plan: access to more features or subscribers for a consistent monthly or annual cost
• Pay-as-you-go plan: pay for and use email credits as you need them

If an email marketing tool doesn’t have an always-free plan, they might offer a free trial where you can sample the app. Monthly email marketing plans for creators typically range from $10-$30 a month at a minimum.

#2 – Email marketing features

Every email marketing tool offers basic features for its entry-level pricing plans. Typically, the cost increases as you access more capabilities. Usually, email marketing tools offer different plan levels that cater to different creator needs.

For example, the Kit Creator Pro plan has the same features as the lower-priced Creator plan, plus extra tools like advanced reporting, newsletter referral programs, subscriber scoring, and priority support.

The features you need depend on your goals and where you’re at in your creator journey. For example, a brand-new creator needs to send broadcast messages to all subscribers, while creators who want to earn a living will use segmentation and email automations to sell their digital products.

Features to look out for when you compare email marketing tools include:

• Customizable email templates
• Basic analytics like open rates and click-through rates
• Email sequences
• Automations
• List segmentation
• Subscriber tagging
• Subscriber scoring
• CAN-SPAM compliance
• Integrations
• A/B testing
• Customer support
• Migration support

#3 – Number of subscribers (aka your list size)

Beyond features, your number of subscribers is another crucial component determining your email marketing cost. The basic mechanics are—the bigger your email list, the higher your email marketing price.

Every email marketing tool handles list size differently, however. Pricing could increase every few thousand subscribers or every few hundred. For example, Kit pricing is the same for lists with 1,000 subscribers up to 3,000, while Mailchimp pricing increases between 1,500 and 2,500 subscribers.

Let’s compare pricing for a few scenarios. In our example, each creator chose Kit’s Creator plan:

• Creator A has a brand new list with 100 subscribers and pays $15 a month
• Creator B hit their goal of 2,500 subscribers and pays $49 a month
• Creator C has spent a few years growing their email list to 14,000 people and pays $149 a month

#4 – Email frequency and volume

Sometimes, email marketing tools base their pricing on your email send volume instead of subscribers. That means your bill would be pretty low if you had 100,000 subscribers on your email list but only sent ten messages a month.

Email pricing based on send frequency and volume usually apply to transactional emails, which most creators don’t manage.

A transactional email responds to a person’s action on a website, like requesting a password change or placing an order. Suppose you’re one of the 80% of full-time creators that use a platform like Kit Commerce or Teachable to sell your products. In that case, you don’t need to worry about transactional emails since these apps manage them.

For example, your customers receive an order confirmation from Kit Commerce or a password reset email from Teachable—not from your email marketing account.

#5 – Landing pages

Some email marketing tools, like Kit, go beyond email and help you grow an audience without a website. Extra features like opt-in forms, landing pages, and custom domains give creators an easy way to collect new email sign-ups.

For example, graphic designer Kelsey Baldwin used a Kit landing page to generate 1,800 subscribers. Creators like Kelsey use a single tool to build and connect with an audience. Even creators on free Kit plans can create unlimited landing pages and forms. Still, not all email marketing tools offer these features.

Another feature to consider when you compare email marketing tools and build your email marketing budget is a newsletter referral program. Newsletter referral programs incentivize current subscribers to recommend you to their friends, which helps you grow your email list up to 200% faster.

For example, Aleyda Solis used a newsletter referral program to go from averaging 300 subscribers per month to more than 1000 subscribers per month.

If growing your email list is a top goal this year, it might be worth upgrading to a higher-priced plan to access a newsletter referral program.

#6 – Quality of current email list

Your email marketing cost isn’t just about how much you spend per month or year on tools—it’s also about your return on investment. On average, email marketers gain $36 for every $1 they invest in email.

The more money you make from your email list, the lower the relative cost of email marketing.

One way to offset your email marketing costs is to clean your email list. ‘Cleaning your list’ means unsubscribing people who don’t open your emails anymore, so you don’t pay extra for inactive subscribers. We recommend removing inactive subscribers every three months.

In addition to removing inactive subscribers, you should maintain an engaged email list. Asking for feedback, targeting your messages, and sending re-engagement campaigns are ways to encourage subscribers to interact with your emails and purchase your product or services.

Your email quality and your email marketing software’s deliverability rate also influence your email marketing costs. If fewer and fewer emails make it into your subscriber’s inbox as you pay the same monthly fee, the average amount you spend per email increases.

#7 Email design and set up: DIY vs. outsourcing

Another factor that fills your email marketing budget is the cost of setting up your account and creating an email. Whether you DIY or outsource your email design and setup, you’ll need features that make it easy.

Design work and imagery

If you want to save money, look for an email marketing plan that has an easy-to-use email designer for non-technical folks and templates to work from. Drag-and-drop editors save you time on email creation, and the option to create an image library gives you easy access to your most-used graphics.

If you plan to hire out your email design, make sure your email marketing tool lets you upload custom HTML templates.

How much does it cost to hire a freelancer?

You can hire a freelancer or agency to help with email strategy, design, or implementation. However, it will add to your project costs.

Kit specialists that help you set up campaigns charge an average of $55 an hour, and email marketing consultants who help you with strategy charge between $75-$125 an hour.

What is the average cost of an email marketing campaign?

The cost of an email marketing campaign for creators can range from $0 if you use a basic plan and do it all yourself up to thousands of dollars if you hire a consultant to strategize, create, and implement the campaign.

For example, Samar Owais made $15,000 in gross revenue from an email list of around 300 subscribers with a launch email and a Google Doc.

37% of professional creators have no employees or contractors on the team, meaning the cost of their email marketing campaigns is just the price of their email marketing platform and their time.

If you want help, you should expect to pay a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on what you need the contractor to do. For example, the average bid on a freelancer project to set up a Kit email sales funnel was $2,039.

Are there any hidden costs?

Now that we’ve reviewed the main factors that influence email marketing pricing, there are a few miscellaneous costs to consider. Your final email price could include:

• Differences in monthly vs. annual pricing—annual plans are usually cheaper per month
• Higher prices for additional admin or account users
• Nonprofit discounts

If you want to know exactly how much your email marketing plan will cost, carefully review what’s included at each level. Kit even lets you view exact pricing based on the type of account and your email list size.

Important email marketing metrics to measure

When you’re building or scaling a creator business, you want every effort to pay off. Tracking email marketing KPIs lets you gauge whether your messages drive engagement and sales. Sometimes switching to a new email marketing platform can improve your email metrics. For example, Kaleigh Moore’s average open rate increased from 40% to 75% when she moved her list from Mailchimp to Kit.

Some metrics you should measure include:

• List growth rate: how much your subscriber count increases each month
• Open rate: what percent of subscribers open your email
• Click-through rate: what percent of subscribers click links in your email
• Revenue per email: how much you earn per email
• Spam reports: what percent of subscribers mark your email as spam

Email marketing is an investment

Email marketing costs can be as low as $0 per month up to more than $1,000 each month if you have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Most creators don’t have to spend much on email marketing, though, since there are more creators with fewer than 1,000 subscribers than those with over 1,000 people on their email list.

Email marketing prices of a few hundred dollars a month pale compared to how much creators can earn through email.

Here are just a few examples of creators using email to earn a living online:

• Email drives more than 80% of all sales for Little Coffee Fox
• Marie Poulin earns $40,000 a month promoting her digital courses via email
• Daphnee Lagredelle earned $100,000 through her coaching business last year with Kit

Email marketing is vital to many creators’ businesses, so the monthly cost is a worthy investment. Try Kit for free today!